JOHANNESBURG—As donor governments slash aid budgets, and multilateral institutions come under increasing financial strain, development organizations must confront the combination of growing need and declining resources. How to address persistent challenges such as poverty and inequality, climate change, and humanitarian crises with fewer resources is an especially urgent question in Africa, where many countries have long relied on external financing to support essential programs and services.
The answer lies in how development is monitored and evaluated, often framed as a neutral, technical exercise measuring whether projects have achieved their objectives. In fact, evaluation is deeply political: it reflects what is seen as important and whose knowledge is trusted, and it influences which programs continue to receive funding. Thus, evaluation determines how resources are allocated and whose solutions are supported and expanded.
More significantly, the standards by which development projects are assessed are important not only for deciding where to channel limited resources, but also for shaping the future of global development governance. The African Union and its member states have long called for reforms to the international development and financial architecture, advocating greater representation, more equitable financing, and a stronger voice for Africa in global decision-making. But these reforms, while important, often overlook another powerful driver of change: control over knowledge and evidence.
To date, evaluation frameworks have largely been influenced by donor priorities, with the aim of tracking and comparing results across contexts. As a result, they often fail to capture the realities within communities and rarely reflect local values. When funders define success, the communities most affected by development programs are treated as sources of data rather than partners in deciding what constitutes meaningful change and how to measure it. As argued in the volume Equitable Evaluation: Voices from the Global South (which two of us co-edited), donors’ expectations and desired outputs take precedence over those of local communities.
With fewer resources now available, and their allocation increasingly dependent on evidence demonstrating impact, there is no better time to implement equitable evaluation practices, which challenge the idea that development can be understood through universal indicators alone. This methodological innovation is grounded in the belief that evidence is shaped by history, context, culture, and power, and that these factors must be considered if evaluation is to advance equity.
African countries and communities, in particular, could adopt Made in Africa Evaluation approaches, which seek to assess development projects according to African realities, values, and priorities. That means recognizing Indigenous knowledge, local institutions, and community experiences as important sources of evidence, while emphasizing that evaluation should reflect the social, cultural, and political contexts in which development takes place. Such a shift ultimately reshapes who holds authority over knowledge itself.
Community participation forces governments to be accountable to citizens, not just funders. For example, when rural health committees monitor clinic performance using community-designed scorecards rather than relying on donor audits, facility managers can identify and respond more quickly to drug shortages, long wait times, or service gaps, while health authorities gain access to locally generated evidence.
Similarly, when farmers help assess irrigation projects, evaluations have revealed practical constraints—such as unreliable water supplies, inadequate maintenance, and inequitable land distribution—that may be overlooked by externally designed indicators. These data can also inform national priorities, resulting in more responsive and efficient development spending. And if regional institutions build their own evaluation capacities, countries will become less dependent on frameworks that may not reflect their development goals.
As such examples show, giving African countries a greater say in international institutions is not enough to reform global development governance. Structural transformation requires giving them a greater role in the collection, interpretation, and use of data and evidence. Without significant changes to evaluation and the resulting knowledge production, calls to “decolonize development” will continue to ring hollow.
The current aid landscape underscores the urgency of this task. The scaling down of foreign assistance should not mean abandoning commitments to equity. Governments, donors, and development organizations should instead work even harder to direct the remaining funds to those who have historically been excluded. This requires evaluation systems capable of revealing inequalities rather than masking them behind national averages and aggregate performance indicators.
It is unclear whether the era of abundant foreign aid is ending or experiencing a temporary crisis. Either way, this moment has created an opening to rethink development cooperation and foster more trust in how these resources are used. In Africa, that can be achieved by ensuring that evaluation practices capture communities’ lived realities and allow success to be defined collaboratively rather than imposed externally.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
